Disclosed herein is a ceramic phoswich with fused optical elements, method of manufacture thereof and articles comprising the same.
In radiation detection applications, it is often desirable to extract depth of interaction information from the detection media. This improves the localization of gamma particles interacting within a solid. A common method allowing one to extract this information is by using a phoswich configuration where two or more scintillators are bonded together into a single functional unit. The scintillation materials used to build a phoswich have distinct scintillation characteristics (for example different scintillation decay times, or different wavelengths) that can be used to determine which section of the phoswich interacted with a gamma particle. Since scintillators used in the phoswich configuration are optically coupled to each other by using an optical coupling material with a significantly lower index of refraction than those of the dense scintillators, significant amounts of scintillation photons are reflected or lost at the scintillator interface with the optical coupling material. This causes significant degradation of the detector energy and time resolution.